In accordance with the requirements of citation databases, proper citation of publications appearing in our Quarterly should include the full name of the journal in Polish and English without Polish diacritical marks, i.e. "Eksploatacja i Niezawodnosc – Maintenance and Reliability".

An integrated model of production scheduling and maintenance planning under imperfect preventive maintenance

For a successful company, machines are always required to work continuously to make more profit in a certain period. However, machines can be unavailable due to the scheduled maintenance activities or unexpected failures. Hence, a model connected production scheduling with maintenance planning for a production line which is composed of multiple machines is developed. Suppose preventive maintenance is imperfect and cannot renew all the machines. Age reduction factor and hazard rate increase factor are introduced to illustrate the imperfect character. Aperiodic preventive maintenance policy is adopted. Replacement as perfect maintenance could restore the machine “as good as new”. When and whether to perform replacement is based on a cost-time rate function which is defined to judge whether or not the preventive maintenance is economical. The objective of the joint model is to maximize the total profit which is composed of production value, production cost, maintenance cost (including the preventive maintenance cost and replacement cost), and tardiness cost (which is related to the job sequence and maintenance activities). To optimize the objective, immune clonal selection algorithm is utilized. The proposed model is validated by a numerical example.

Reliability analysis of the products subject to competing failure processes with unbalanced data

Considering the degradation and catastrophic failure modes simultaneously, a general reliability analysis model was presented for the competing failure processes with unbalanced data. For the degradation process with highly unbalanced data, we developed a linear random-effects degradation model. The model parameters can be estimated based on a simple least square method. Furthermore, to fully utilize the degradation information, we considered the last measured times of the degradation units that had only one or two measured time points as zero-failure data or right-censored data of the catastrophic failure mode. Then the incomplete data set was composed of zero-failure data and catastrophic failure data. To analyze the incomplete data, the definition of the interval statistics was firstly given. The best linear unbiased parameter estimators of catastrophic failure were obtained based on the Gauss-Markov theorem. Then, the reliability function of the competing failure processes was given. The corresponding two-sided confidence intervals of the reliability were obtained based on a bootstrap procedure. Finally, a practical application case was examined by applying the proposed method and the results demonstrated its validity and reasonability.

Joint optimization of replacement and spare ordering for critical rotary component based on condition signal to date

It is widely accepted that condition-based replacement can not only make full use of components, but also decline inventory cost if the procurement of spare parts can be triggered upon accurate failure prediction. Most of the existing degradation or failure prediction models and approaches are population-based failures or suspensions, namely, to predict the failure time of a component, there are some failure or suspension histories of same type or similar components which can be used as reference. However, in practice, there exists the phenomenon in which no failure or suspension histories for some components can be used, what can be utilized is just the collected condition monitoring signals to date. In that case, failure time and probability are difficult to be estimated accurately. In this paper, a novel degradation prediction approach is introduced. Meantime, a new failure probability estimation function is developed based on component “service time” and “degradation extent” simultaneously. Then replacement and spare part ordering are jointly optimized according to the estimated failure probability. The optimization objective is to minimize long-run cost rate. Two bearing datasets are used to validate the proposed approach.